Julien Wittouck , the author of this book, himself asked me for an honest feedback . So, to respect his request, I will be direct and transparent, without waffle or complacency. This is my personal opinion, and while it may seem subjective, it is based on my daily experience with Terraform , where I would rate my mastery at a level 7 out of 10. This means that I am not an absolute expert, but experienced enough to judge the relevance of the content.
First of all, let's admit it: this book is a very beautiful ig data achievement . It is clear, well written, and Julien knows how to transmit his expertise with pedagogy. However, a first small personal disappointment: I did not see my site mentioned in the list of recommended resources.
Furthermore, I regret the lack of concrete examples using OUTSCALE , a sovereign Cloud platform. Julien, if you are reading these lines, I would be happy to collaborate with you for a future edition by providing you with all the necessary information on this subject.
One topic I would have liked to see covered in more depth, beyond a mere mention in the introduction, is the complementarity between Terraform and configuration management tools . These tools are often seen as competitors, when in reality they play distinct but perfectly complementary roles. Terraform excels at resource provisioning : it is designed to create and manage things like virtual machines, networks, databases, and other components of infrastructure and services delivered as a service. However, once these resources are provisioned, their internal configuration —installing software, tuning system parameters, or deploying applications—is the specialty of tools like Ansible , Chef , or Puppet . I would have appreciated seeing the book explore this complementarity in more detail , explaining how and these tools can work together to form a complete solution, combining infrastructure automation and internal configuration management. (Just my opinion.)
The section on basic concepts could be enriched with the definition of what data sources are, which allow a project to be broken down into several parts, avoiding ending up with complex and difficult to manage code.
Another note is Terraform 's non-cloud uses , a topic I found underrepresented in the book. Many people think that Terraform is limited to managing resources on AWS, Azure, or GCP, but that's far from the truth. Terraform can provision environments on local platforms like Proxmox , Incus , or even manage containers with Docker .
This would have deserved a dedicated section, because these alternative uses show all the power and versatility of the tool. Perhaps I skimmed over this part, but it seems to me that it could have been put forward more to break down preconceived ideas.
Finally, an important topic for me that I would have liked to see covered in more detail: secrets management . Although Julien mentions twice the integration of Vault or the parameter sensitivein the declaration of a variable, the approach remains a little quick for my taste. However, the management of secrets like API keys, passwords and other sensitive information is so important. A more detailed section on how to use Vault/BAO with Terraform would have been a real plus, especially for teams looking to respect security best practices.
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